Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With its purloined letters, incestuous jealousies and galloping neuroses, A Time of Destiny spins enough plot for a year of Falcon Crest, then filches its climax from Hitchcock's Vertigo and Saboteur. So how come nothing works? Maybe because this family farrago is played for keeps, instead of for the laughs it accidentally evokes...
...good stuff. Nicolas Roeg casts his wife, the exemplary Theresa Russell, as King Zog of Albania foiling a terrorist plot to the strains of Un Ballo in Maschera. Jean-Luc Godard sets Lully's Armide in a Paris gym. Body builders pump iron; two gorgeous sorceresses dust them off. Murder is in the air, and the kinetic poetry Godard can create from the way a woman's hair falls across her face. Julien Temple's witty episode -- quick gags and endless tracking shots -- plops Rigoletto into California's baroque Madonna Inn. A movie producer philanders in a room decorated...
Superstitious theater folk call it "the Scottish play." For them, merely to speak its name is to invite worse agonies than any conjured from eye of newt and toe of frog. More rational observers, too, view Macbeth as fraught with difficulties. Its plot cannot work unless skeptical modern audiences will believe in witches and the supernatural. The central couple kill in unforeshadowed haste and repent in wearisome leisure. As a tyrant, Macbeth seems a paranoiac cross between Herod, slaughtering a legion of innocents to be sure he got the right one, and the pathetic people who kill entire families...
...Cloud 9 can be said to have a plot--a mighty big "If"--it exists only to carry the play from the jokey sex scene or pick-up scene to the next. Every character is to some degree obsessed with sex. The problem is that the characters are at the same time confused about their sexual identities. Some are secretly homosexual or bisexual, some are secretly adulterous, some secretly share one or more of these traits and some display them openly. To further confuse things, some of the actors and actresses cross-dress to play people of the opposite...
...World War II centers around the continuing struggle of a Black officer, Captain Richard Davenport, to receive the respect that his rank deserves, and the lost struggle of another Black officer, Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, who failed to maintain his dignity as a man or as a soldier. The plot consists of Davenport's investigation of Waters' murder and the added tensions it imposes upon the all Black company of army soldiers and their white commanding officers...